President Barack Obama played a traditional Election Day game of basketball Tuesday -- and won. Rival Mitt Romney made final campaign stops in Ohio and Pennsylvania and wrote a victory speech on his plane. "I feel like we put it all on the field. We left nothing in the locker room. We fought to the very end, and I think that's why we'll be successful," Romney told reporters aboard his plane as he flew from Pittsburgh to Boston. Obama said to reporters in Chicago: "We feel confident we've got the votes to win but it's going to depend ultimately on whether these votes turn out." He played hoops with former Chicago Bulls star Scottie Pippen, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other friends and politicos.

Jared Reiff, a freshman in business, leans into the voting booth while filling out his ballot Tuesday at the University of Colorado in Boulde. (Mark Leffingwell)

A voting machine in Pennsylvania lit up for Republican Mitt Romney when a voter pressed a button for Democrat Barack Obama. A Florida elections office mistakenly told voters in robocalls the election was Wednesday. And in Philadelphia, the Republican Party said 75 legally credentialed inspectors were blocked from polling places until they got a court order giving them access. These were among the scattered problems reported Tuesday as America went to the polls to elect a president and decide the balance of power in the House and Senate. The vote-switching machine in Pennsylvania was recalibrated and put back into service after what was described as a "momentary glitch." There were also reports that poll workers in Pennsylvania were demanding IDs even though they aren't required.

A parolee working at a chicken processing plant in Fresno pulled out a gun Tuesday and opened fire, killing two people and wounding two others before taking his own life, police said. What prompted the attack by Lawrence Jones, 42, was a mystery, although co-workers at Apple Valley Farms said he didn't seem to be himself when he arrived for work at 5 a.m. Co-workers said Jones waited until three and a half hours into his shift to pull out a handgun and open fire. "It is difficult to say at this point if in fact there was a specific target that Jones was looking for," Police Chief Jerry Dyer said. "There was something that must have provoked this incident, perhaps that occurred today, or maybe was building up to today." Jones has an extensive criminal history dating back into the 1990s, Dyer said without elaborating.

Gunmen killed the brother of Syria's parliament speaker Tuesday in Damascus as the international envoy for the country warned that it could become another Somalia. Mohammed Osama Laham, the brother of Parliament Speaker Jihad Laham, was killed in a hail of bullets as he drove to work, the state news agency said. The killing came a day after some of the most intense fighting Damascus has seen in the uprising to unseat President Bashar Assad. A series of explosions Tuesday killed 13 people and wounded 30 on the northwestern edge of Damascus, the government and opposition said. Meanwhile, U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said: "I don't want to go too far in pessimism, but the situation in Syria is very dangerous. The Syrian people are suffering a lot. I believe that if the crisis is not solved in a right way, there will be the danger of Somalization. It will mean the fall of the state, rise of war lords and militias."

A Chicago-area woman went into labor Tuesday, but before heading to the hospital she headed to the polls. Galicia Malone, 21, voted at a church in Dolton around 8:30 a.m. -- when her water had already broken and her contractions were five minutes apart. Malone said it's the first presidential election in which she's eligible to vote, and doing so made "a major difference in my life."

The Wire, a summary of top national and world news stories from the Associated Press and other wire services, moves weekdays. Contact Karl Kahler at 408-920-5023; follow him at twitter.com/karl_kahler.